Product Overview
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents attention, bites into her mothers homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mothers emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her motherher cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mothertastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.
The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hiddenher mothers life outside the home, her fathers detachment, her brothers clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Benders place as a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language (San Francisco Chronicle).
